Entertainment

7 Hackathons Around the World and on the Web

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Sometimes, there's nothing quite as entertaining and exhilarating as a 48-hour break from the norm to hack together a new app for profit or pleasure.

While a lot of you might spend your weekends coding and designing side projects, others prefer the structure — and inability to procrastinate — of an event. A hackathon, if you will. Twitter, Facebook, Google and a lot of other major tech companies host these events periodically, as well; keep an eye on each company's developer channel to stay informed about upcoming Developer Garages, Hack Days and Code Jams.

While you wait for those events to roll around, however, here are a handful of web and IRL hacker events designed to keep your minds limber and your GitHub repositories fresh. If you're lucky, you just might get a working side project (or a working team) out of it.

The idea of Startup Weekend is that over the course of two and a half days a group of hackers and designers can take a web or mobile app idea from a concept to a (mostly) functioning product ready to be pitched to VCs and press. The event takes place in a real-world space; you can code through the night or bring a sleeping bag.

This event is the brainchild of Andrew Hyde, a staffer at TechStars, mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. The first Startup Weekend took place in 2007 in startup hotbed, Boulder, Colorado. Today, Startup Weekend events have been held in cities all over the U.S. and all over the world. To find an upcoming event near you, just check the website.

Best of all, if a Startup Weekend hasn't been planned in your community, you can work with the organizers to start one yourself.

Node.js Knockout is a 48-hour node.js coding contest held on the web. This year's Knockout will take place from August 28-29, from midnight to midnight. According to the rules of the contest, you can work on any imaginable web project; but you have to start from scratch and work with no more than 3 other people. You can use node.js and anything else you like.

Why node, you might ask? The event's organizers, who clearly have a deep and abiding love for this server-side, evented I/O framework, write on the site, "It’s at the bleeding edge of a technology stack that allows developers to blur the lines between software, the web, and the new like never before." If node's on your list of tech to learn, this might be the perfect motivation.

Co-founded by David Weekly (of PBWorks fame), SuperHappyDevHouse (SHDH) is a concept event that gave birth to and is now part of Hacker Dojo, a kind of hacker community center based in Silicon Valley. It's what you might consider one of the first of its kind: Part party, part hackathon, part serious, all innovative.

SHDH events have been held on a roughly monthly basis since its inception in 2005. This concept has also given rise to DevHouse events all over the world, from Pittsburgh and Austin to Cologne and Guadalajara. And if you want to start your own DevHouse event, that's just fine by Weekly, et al.

If you like Python and you like games, have we got a hackathon for you.

PyWeek is coming up and will run from August 22-29. This web-based contest gives teams seven full days to build a working game from scratch. The game has to be fun (duh), and it should probably contribute in some way to the currently available body of knowledge about game development.

Also, each game should incorporate a predetermined theme. We're not sure what August's theme will be; if you're interested, check the website again in a couple weeks.

Yahoo's Hack Days have been going on for some time now. They occur periodically in cities around the world and at universities, too.

Next month, Yahoo is sponsoring an Open Hack Day in Bangalore on July 24 and 25, and upcoming "Hack U" events at schools and colleges will be announced soon.

Yahoo does a lot to support and motivate developers these days. In addition to hosting Hack Days, the company is also running a contest with Paypal to get devs to use Paypal's APIs and Yahoo's dev tools (YQL, for example) to create innovative applications. The contest allows for about one month of development time, and registration begins on August 1. One benefit of this contest is the impressive cash prizes offered to winners.

Another popular, Python-flavored, single-technology-based contest is the Django Dash. This fairly popular framework is used as a starting point for a 48-hour code-a-thon. This year, devs will form teams of up to three members and have two days (from midnight on August 13 until 11:59 p.m. on August 14) to create open-source apps.

The event's organizers see the dash as a great way "for Django enthusiasts to flex their coding skills a little and put a fine point on 'perfectionists with deadlines.'"

Later this fall, from October 15-17, the famous Rails Rumble will pit teams of Ruby devs against one another in a 48-hour, web-based challenge. This contest is the one that spawned events such as the Django Dash and Node Knockout, from the cleverly alliterative titles to the 2-days-one-technology format.

Teams can be as large as four people or as small as one hacker flying solo. You can use Rails or another Rack-based framework to build and deploy a web app. As a former Rumble judge, I can attest that the codemanship is impressive in this contest, and the resulting apps engender a lasting fascination.

Of course, you can always start a hackathon of your own, either in your local hacker enclave or on the web. If you do so, be sure to tell us about it.

And if we left out your favorite time-limited developer contest, feel free to enlighten us in the comments.

[Full disclosure: Mashable Editor Josh Catone's web site Rails Forum has been a sponsor of the Rails Rumble.]

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